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Language and tool use both need putamen: A VLSM study
Poster C42 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Zhiyu Fan1, Haojie Wen1, Yanchao Bi1,2; 1Beijing Normal University, 2Chinese Institute for Brain Research
Tool use and language are two major hallmark behaviors of human evolution. These two behaviors have been hypothesized to share a common cognitive origin – hierarchical processes. Supporting evidence included correlations in behavioral tasks, transfers in learning, and overlapping neural activity in basal ganglia. Here we test this hypothesis using a causal brain modal – patients with brain damage – and examine the relational pattern in which brain lesion leads to deficits in language and tool processing. Ninety-three patients with brain injury and 43 healthy controls were recruited. They completed a wide range of behavioral tasks related to language and tool processing and underwent structural MRI scans with lesions manually traced for each patient. First, Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) was employed to detect voxels important for sentence comprehension and for tool use, with word-picture verification as control task for sentence comprehension and action imitation for tool use to exclude impairment due to individual word comprehension and peripheral motor processes. Regions whose lesion lead to deficits in both sentence comprehension and tool use were identified based on two analyses: Regions with significant voxels for both analyses; Regions whose VLSM t-scores for the two tasks were significantly correlated across voxels. Both analyses converge on left putamen. To more directly examine whether the common effect between sentence comprehension and tool use was indeed related to hierarchical processing, we performed an error analysis on language production– the “cookie theft” description task. The proportions of well-formed sentences and embedded clauses being generated were taken as a measure of syntactical hierarchical ability for each patient. VLSM analysis using this measure also converged on left putamen. These above results were robust across a series of validation analyses using different statistical measures (Bayes z-scores compared to the healthy control group) or different brain parcellation template (the Human Brainnetome Atlas). These results provide further supports for the role of basal ganglia (putamen in particular) in supporting joint processes of tools and languages, showing that the integrity of this subcortical structure is necessary in normal (hierarchical) language and tool processing. An account naturally accommodate these findings are tool use and language both entail the ability to integrate lower-order elements into higher-order units, which is supported by putamen.
Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics, Disorders: Acquired